Technical Advisory Committee

The Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) plays a vital role in development of the GISR architecture and advises the Board of Directors on the full range of technical issues. Committee members serve in their capacity as individuals. Affiliations are for identification purposes only.

Members of the Technical Advisory Committee during their March 2015 meeting

Harun Asad, Con Edison

Previously, as Commercial Marketing & Business Development Manager for Con Edison’s Competitive Energy Businesses, Mr. Asad led cross-functional teams focused on driving topline growth through new products/markets and business-to-business marketing programs. He also served as an Innovation Board member helping to launch innovation management tools and processes. Prior to Con Edison, Harun held several corporate, consulting and academic positions outside the energy sector.

Harun holds a BS in Marketing, an MBA with honors, and has completed graduate studies in information technology. He resides with his wife and two children in New York. An avid tennis and food enthusiast, Harun can often be found on the courts or exploring new cuisine.

Catherine Benoit, New Earth/UN Advisor

Catherine Benoît is the Vice President of Social Sustainability at New Earth. She is also a Visiting Scholar at University of New Hampshire and a project leader at The Sustainability Consortium for Social Responsibility.

Catherine’s expertise lies in CSR and in social impacts assessment of products and development projects. Her experience in leading the development of the UNEP Life Cycle Initiative Social Life Cycle Assessment Guidelines (http://lcinitiative.unep.fr/) prompted her to design tools facilitating the use of the methodology worldwide. Her current project, the development of the Social Hotspots Database, will allow wide use of Social Life Cycle Assessment by a multitude of stakeholders and contribute to improve the social conditions in global product life cycle. Catherine is also an advisor to sustainable purchasing initiatives, to social responsibility supply chains metrics development initiatives, and to the ecoinvent committee on impact indicators. She is also a project leader within the Sustainability Consortium and the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative.

She holds a bachelor of science in anthropology from University of Montreal, and a master’s in environmental sciences from University of Quebec at Montreal. She is currently completing a PhD in administrative science in the Montreal joint doctoral program (McGill-UQAM-HEC-Concordia). Catherine’s professional goal is to contribute to make all trade fair. In this perspective she works to facilitate mediation, solution development and capacity building amongst stakeholders in the complex dynamic context of a global economy, locally based. She is especially interested in the questions related to trade and human rights.

Sarah is a sustainability practitioner interested in helping business drive sustainable development by becoming more competitive. In her capacity as Manager, CEO Leadership at CECP, she creates strategy to deepen CEO engagement across the 150 leading companies that comprise CECP’s community and brings to life an ambitious schedule of opportunities that showcase and involve mostly Fortune 500 CEOs in CECP’s mission of business as a force for good. She co-leads the New York City chapter of Women Investing for a Sustainable Economy (WISE) and holds a seat on the International Integrated Reporting Council’s (IIRC) Framework Panel. Previously, Sarah kept pulse on macro-level trends and shaped global policy on sustainability transparency and disclosure for some 8000 companies as Manager, Reporting at the United Nations (UN) Global Compact. She managed institutional partnerships with other policy leaders such as IIRC and GRI. In addition, she piloted projects that drive integration, valuation, & communication of ESG issues in mainstream financial markets (e.g., stock markets and investor relations) while co-coordinating the UN’s Sustainable Stock Exchanges initiative during its transformative growth phase. Prior to the UN Global Compact, Sarah led strategic and operational sustainability projects in the civil sector at AIESEC, and in the private sector as a consultant at BSD Consulting, particularly in Latin America. She now lives in New York City and spends her free time being a resident tourist. LinkedInTwitter

Greg Elders, Bloomberg

Greg Elders is on the ESG team at Bloomberg. Previously, he was Director of Research at EQ2; SME and Supply Chain Program Manager at GRI; Head of Research at Trucost; and Treasury Strategist Assistant Vice President at Merrill Lynch.

Greg holds a Master of Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA in Economics from Cornell University.

Peter Ellsworth, Ceres

Peter is responsible for strengthening and expanding the participation of asset owners and asset managers in INCR, the investor group committed to more rigorous sustainability policies and practices, including improved management of water and energy resources and green house gas emissions.

Peter brings to Ceres more than twenty years in the Capital Markets, working with investors, asset managers and corporations designing investment structures and risk management solutions.

His most recent roles were with KLD and the FTSE KLD index partnership, where he was Managing Director of business development and index licensing for the full suite of both firms’ ESG indexes, encompassing environmental, sustainable, faith-based, climate change and fixed income strategies. Prior to KLD he was principally focused on derivatives solutions in the foreign exchange and fixed income markets, including roles with BankBoston, where he was Managing Director of Foreign Exchange with a special focus on the emerging markets and on the bank’s business opportunities with its investment bank Robertson Stevens; with Deutsche Bank in New York, where he headed the special products group and managed the firm’s currency options portfolio; and with Goldman Sachs at a time when the growth of international investing by institutional investors was introducing new risks into their portfolios.

He was educated at Franklin & Marshall College and the University of Brussels and holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago.

John Kim, The Walt Disney Company

John Kim is a manager on the Insights and Integration team within The Walt Disney Company’s Corporate Citizenship department. He leads the company’s citizenship reporting efforts and their work in prioritizing, monitoring, and responding to citizenship/sustainability rankings and ratings. Previously he was the Better World marketing manager at Herman Miller, an account planner at Lipman Hearne and a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco.

He has his master’s in public policy from Georgetown University and a BS in human development and policy analysis and management from Cornell University.

Anastasia O’Rourke, Industrial Economics Inc.

Anastasia O’Rourke is a Special Consultant with Industrial Economics Inc. a privately held consulting firm founded in 1981, providing expert analysis to clients in government, business, and not-for-profit organizations. Dr. O’Rourke has over 16 years experience in the field of sustainability, providing expert strategy, measurement, and analysis services. She specializes in sustainable purchasing and supply chain, products, standards and ecolabels, enterprise-level sustainability assessments, ratings and program evaluation. Prior to IEc, Dr. O’Rourke co-founded Big Room Inc., and helped to win the .ECO top level domain; and created ecolabelindex.com. She has consulted to a wide range of government, industry and non-profit clients. Dr. O’Rourke holds a B.A. (Hons, 1st Class) from Sydney University; a M.Sc. In Industrial Environmental Management from Lund University, Sweden, and a Ph.D. in environmental management and finance from Yale University with a dissertation on cleantech venture capital. She is currently leading the Committee on Supplier Ratings (COSR) project on the application of sustainable investing ratings to procurement settings with a wide range of partners; and serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council (SPLC).

Herwig Peeters, ARISE, Forum Ethibel

Herwig Peeters is managing director at Forum ETHIBEL, a Belgian independent association, created in 1992 and recognized as an expert in rating, independent audits and certification of products and services that meet ESG and ethical standards. He is president of ARISE, the Association for Responsible Investment Services, a worldwide trade association of ESG raters, that manages ARISTA 3.0®, the quality standard for professional responsible investors. Herwig promotes Responsible Investing by providing specific instruments such as sustainability indices and quality labels. He was strategic advisor with an emphasis on European CSR-policies, standards for ESG research, harmonization, certification and the development of international networks. He was founder of Stock@Stake, the precursor of Vigeo Belgium, and a leading European expert in assessing responsible performance.

Manica Piputbundit, TIAA

Manica Piputbundit is a member of TIAA’s Responsible Investment team. Her responsibilities include managing the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy for TIAA’s ESG investment funds and related products, including the continuous enhancement and board-level oversight of the ESG guidelines for the funds. She also provides research, analytical, and overall support to the Responsible Investment team mandate, including initiatives related to the development of ESG integration frameworks across asset classes. Manica joined the TIAA organization in 2012. Prior to that, she worked for Morgan Stanley in the Institutional Equities Division in New York and Hong Kong. She holds a B.A. in Economics and Computer Science from Columbia University and an M.B.A from New York University Stern School of Business.

Kristina Rüter, oekom research AG

Since 2003 with independent Munich-based sustainability rating agency oekom research AG, Kristina Rüter started as an Analyst and in 2007 became a Research Director and team leader shaping the agency’s ESG research on extractive industries and the energy sector as well as the assessment of climate risks and environmental controversial practices. From 2013 until February 2016, she served as Director Research Methodology and worked on methodology and product developments related to the oekom Corporate Rating, the oekom Sustainability Bond Rating, Second Party Opinions for Green and Social Bonds, oekom Carbon Risk Rating and the oekom Fossil Fuel Screening as well as bespoke research solutions for integration and positive/negative screening. In February 2016, she was appointed Head of Research.

Bernhard Schwager, Robert Bosch GmbH.

From 1980 to 1985 Bernhard Schwager studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg, Germany. Between 1985 and 2005 he acted as an internal consultant within Siemens AG in the fields of Environmental Protection and Technical Safety, both on the plant and corporate levels, before he moved to Robert Bosch GmbH. In May 2006, he was appointed as the President of the German Association of Environmental Professionals (VBU) and since May 2008, he has served as chair of the German committee Environmental Management Systems and Audits within the German Standard Institute (DIN NAGUS). In January 2009, he received a Master degree of Environmental Science. Within the corporate communication department of Bosch, Schwager runs the Sustainability Office. He acts as the contact person for different stakeholder groups and pushes forward sustainability items. Schwager represents the company in various national and international organisations and associations, like B.A.U.M., VBU, AfW, GRI, GC, ISO, DIN, ecosense, BDI or ZVEI.

George Serafeim, Harvard Business School

George Serafeim is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He teaches the courses “Innovating for Sustainability” and “South Africa; Innovating for Sustainability in an Emerging Market” in the MBA elective curriculum, the Executive Education program “Innovating for Sustainability”, and the doctoral seminar “The Role of the Corporation in Society”.

Professor Serafeim’s research interests are international, focusing on understanding the relation between environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance and financial performance, how innovations in processes, products and business models can lead to improvements in both ESG and financial performance, and the role of disclosure, information and financial intermediation in efficient capital allocation and long-term value creation. His work has been published in prestigious academic and practitioner journals such as the Journal of International Business Studies, Review of Accounting Studies, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Finance, Contemporary Accounting Research, Management Science, Financial Analysts Journal, MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Director Notes, Harvard Business Review and has also appeared in media outlets including Bloomberg, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and NPR. In the area of corporate sustainability, he has written more than twenty business cases on organizations from around the world.

He currently serves on the Technical Advisory Committee of the Global Initiative for Sustainability Ratings that is designing a generally accepted standard for sustainability ratings. Moreover, he is a member of the Standards Council of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board that is engaged in the development and dissemination of industry-specific sustainability accounting standards.

Kristen Sullivan, Deloitte

Kristen Sullivan leads Deloitte’s Sustainability Reporting, Assurance and Compliance services, working with clients to help address their sustainability and non-financial disclosure needs. Kristen brings extensive experience in sustainability risk assessment, reporting and assurance, and additionally leads Deloitte’s efforts in the area of social impact investing.

Kristen also leads Deloitte’s Conflict Minerals Advisory and Assurance Services. She brings a unique variety of insights to this regulatory reporting requirement from her previous area of focus on Regulatory & Public Policy Matters for the firm, recognizing the broader policy as well as the compliance implications of this issue from a corporate brand and reputation standpoint.

Kristen serves as a member of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) Advisory Council, the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) Working Group, the Global Initiative for Sustainability Ratings (GISR) Technical Advisory Committee, the GRI US Focal Point Advisory Council, and serves as a member of the AICPA Conflict Minerals and Sustainability Assurance Task Forces.

Kristen is a CPA and began her career with Deloitte LLP in the Audit and Advisory services practice, serving clients in the Manufacturing and Aerospace & Defense industries. She has also served in the firm’s National Office in several different capacities. In her role working with the deputy CEO of Deloitte LLP focusing on regulatory and public policy matters for the firm, Kristen co-authored an article published in the International Journal of Disclosure and Governance, How and why an independent audit matters.